Author: Jon Ostrower

I’m beginning to see a recurring pattern for how I post these issues of iFlight. I’ll have the first issue out on time, get bogged down getting the remaining issues ready, only to post day two and three together later in the week. Without further delay, here’s iFlight for days two and three at EAA AirVenture:

This is not DCA, originally uploaded by flightblogger.

The gate scene out the wing of this United Airlines Airbus A319 (N822UA) is not National Airport, the destination of my ticket. Instead, I have found myself at Dulles Airport after flight 626 diverted when National Airport shut down with thunderstorms over Washington, DC. Listening to Channel 9, we had enough fuel to hold over the city until 8:31 ET. A few minutes before that time arrived, ATC called up and reported that DCA was fully gridlocked. Our alternate was now active, sending us to Dulles. While DCA was locked up tighter than Fort Knox, we made a smooth approach on 19C to IAD.

We taxiied to the gate expecting to deplane and get a taxi to the city, however United dispatch decided to send up a fuel truck to fill up the tanks and make the 35 mile flight from Dulles to National. We are finishing up the fueling process now, and United says we are pushing back in about 20 minutes. I was given the option to deplane here at Dulles, but what self-respecting aviation geek wouldn’t take the opportunity to fly an A319 from Dulles to National.

Having heard more than my fair share of airline customer service horror stories, I thought it was very much worth noting how great the United crew has been on this flight, keeping us updated on the latest status while maintaining a positive and friendly attitude about the whole situation.

UPDATE: We pushed off the gate at 10:37 PM with information Quebec and taxiied to Runway 30, and were cleared for takeoff at 10:45. Our intern-extraordinare, Dan Webb, was flipping through Hemisphere’s magazine as we taxiied for takeoff. Like any good aviation geek, he stopped on the route map for a moment. Looking across the two seats at his open magazine, I joked. “You’re not going to find it in there.”

During the quick hop we made it as high as 7,000ft before landing on Runway 1 at 11:07 PM. We were back at the gate at 11:11 PM, making our total travel time a whopping 34 minutes. Twenty-two of which was spent in the air, compared to 12 minutes taxiing. All put together, the flight from Dulles to National was just about the same time as drive from Dulles to downtown D.C.

Last night reminded me of another short hop flight that United runs as normal scheduled service. Flight 3, which includes a leg from Kahului to Kona, Hawaii, clocking in at 18 minutes. That flight, flown with a much larger Boeing 777, hops between tropical islands before heading back to Chicago. DC was humid and downright tropical last night, but Hawaii it was not.

OSHKOSH — Tuesday afternoon at Oshkosh, a panel of social media practitioners (gurus, addicts) are gathering to discuss how to apply new media to address (and solve) communication challenges in aviation. Rob Mark, curator or Jetwhine.com, has organized Tuesday’s event, which we hope will add a lot of value beyond “what is Twitter” and really get into the heart of how to apply these tools. I’ll be there with Mr. Mark, Scott Spangler, Rod Rakic from MyTransponder.com and Dan Webb, author of Things in The Sky and Flightglobal intern extraordinare. We hope to see you at 5:15 PM in Pavilion 6 at EAA!

AirVenture 2010 will soon be home to thousands of airplanes,
hundreds of thousands of people and dozens and dozens of great programs
all designed to stimulate just about anyone’s curiosity about all
things aviation. For the social-media curious, there’s something new
this year … collaboration … with an attitude!

Jetwhine is teaming up with the Airplane Geeks, Flightblogger and MyTransponder
to build an interactive session that answers the social-media question
to which everyone wants an answer; how can we stop wasting time and
money noodling with Facebook, Twitter and blogs and solve some of the real customer-engagement problems facing our industry.

The panel begins at 4 PM on Tuesday July 27^th in Pavilion
6 just north of the control tower and runs until 5:15 PM. That means
we’ll run concurrently with the airshow so arrive early to get a seat
up front.

Our panelists include Rob Mark and Scott Spangler from Jetwhine, Rod
Rakic from MyTransponder, Dan Webb from the Airplane Geeks and Jon
Ostrower from Flight Global. All are experienced social media
practitioners who will tell us where social media’s headed and what
your company needs to know to stay one-step ahead of your competitor.

If you’re “just” a social media aficionado hoping to follow
the action or meet the experts, you’re most welcome to join us and
listen in. But we also hope you’ll add your two cents to the
discussion.

Whether you plan to join us or not, do send along a real-life
aviation problem that social media has solved for you, or an area the
industry needs to focus on where engaging huge groups of people might
just be the answer for you or your company.

And just for fun, we’ll be auditioning a guest host for a future
Airplane Geeks show, so plan to rehearse your best elevator pitch
before next Tuesday about why YOU should be our choice. We’ll
also have some Airplane Geeks T-Shirts to give away and of course, some
of those incredible Jetwhine buttons to impress your friends at the
show.

All our panelists should be on Twitter during the show by the way.
Rob Mark’s @jetwhine, Dan Webb’s @danwebbage, Jon Ostrower’s
@flightblogger and Rod Rakic is @mytransponder.

See you next week. And we’ll even tell you the meaning of #OSH10 in today’s title.

Rob Mark, editor

Welcome to Oshkosh 2010!, originally uploaded by flightblogger.

OSHKOSH — 737s, DC-3s, Harriers and Tri-motors, nowhere else on earth will you be able to see a more eclectic mix of aircraft. So begins the EAA AirVenture 2010. Stay tuned.

Trying to rip open the planet’s most established – and entrenched – duopoly is not for the faint of heart.

Three years before its entry into service the world media is trumpeting the 2010 Farnborough Air Show as a failure for Bombardier without an order for the CSeries, though at this point in the new aircraft’s development is a rapidly growing backlog essential?

The shopping spree witnessed at Farnborough was almost entirely for aircraft that are currently in production, with near term delivery dates attached. In part, Farnborough represented a show of pent up demand after 18 months of cautious buying.

The only aircraft not currently in service to receive firm orders at the show were 3 787-8s from Royal Jordanian and 30 Sukhoi Superjets from Kartika Airlines. Farnborough was about the aircraft of today, not the ones of tomorrow.

Let us for a moment put things into a bit of perspective: According to the Flight archive, in March 1986, two full years before its entry into service in 1988, the A320 had 100 firm orders and 157 options in the backlog.

This stands in comparison to CSeries orders three years before entry into service at 90 firm and 90 options.

Would an order represent a major boost of confidence for the program? Absolutely. Orders are the stamp of approval for the product, validating its backing by existing customers, as well as investors.  

Yet what Bombardier needed, and what it got this week, were orders for its existing commercial and business jet portfolio. From a development perspective, deposits for CSeries are not significant enough to pay for the program moving forward, what Bombardier requires is healthy cash flow through its mature aircraft programs to help pay for CSeries development.

Most importantly, Bombardier is no longer competing with today’s A319 and 737-700. The product has successfully forced Boeing and Airbus to defend its territory. The CSeries on paper is a step change beyond both, but the CSeries is now shadowboxing three products that may or may not come into existence before the end of the year.

By all appearances, the big four, Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier and Embraer, are playing a game of chicken, seeing who will blink first and announce their plans for their respective narrowbody products.

Airbus is believed to be pacing this decision for the industry, with one official on the propulsion side of the business telling FlightBlogger that Bombardier would prefer to give more clarity to its technical plans after Airbus’s re-engining details emerge, rather than the other way around.

Boeing’s company line remains firm, with the airfamer saying it will be “market driven” in its decision, at least indirectly implying that its customers are in a holding pattern for what will be offered by both airframers as the market has yet to make a decision. At this point, Boeing is hinting at a single engine choice for whatever it does next. As of April, Boeing had tested only a 737 with a CFM Leap-X engine configuration in the wind tunnel, says an engineer close to the development.

For Embraer, which was mum on its plans for the future, hinted late in the week to Brazilian newspaper Valor Economico that it would make a decision on a clean-sheet 130-seat jet by year’s end. For Bombardier, its intentions are clear, but the technical details behind its new aircraft remain elusive. Industry officials say that even the geometry of the aircraft’s composite wing has been a closely held secret by the Canadian airframer.

With a lack of clarity being the only constant across the world’s leading airframer, how can customers possibly make a decision about which horse to back?

Though as another mid-summer show draws to a close, what Boeing, Airbus and Embraer decide to do over the next five months may decide the course of commercial aircraft development for the next decade.

In the insanity that is a mid-summer air show, occasionally things get left behind. In this case  it was day two and day three of Flightglobal’s interactive Flight Daily magazine iFlight. Make sure you take a minute to dive into both issues. We hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed putting them together.